How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager) E-Book

Jennifer A. McGowan

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 43

Beschreibung

The tarot has been used to play games since the 15th century. Since that time each card has also accumulated meanings. By the 18th century the tarot was used for divination or for oracular purposes, much like the Delphic oracles of old. Nowadays the trumps, or major arcana, are believed to chronicle, symbolically, the journey of the Fool through life.How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager) explores, exploits, and sometimes downright twists the major arcana and the meanings they have accumulated, in the order in which the many hundreds of tarot decks now travelling the world present them. The Star, connoting hope, exists simultaneously as metaphor and feral dog; the rebirth nestled inside the Death card becomes female friendship and escape from patriarchal binds.

Leseprobe

First published in UK 2022 by Arachne Press Limited

100 Grierson Road, London, SE23 1NX

www.arachnepress.com

© Jennifer A. McGowan 2022

ISBNs

Print: 978-1-913665-64-7

eBook: 978-1-913665-65-4

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of Arachne Press.

Thanks to Muireann Grealy for her proofreading.

Cover design: Tom Charlesworth 2022.

To the best of aunts, Beth Phillips.

Acknowledgements

Poems in this collection have been published, sometimes in slightly different versions, in Obsessed with Pipework, The International Times, Acumen, Poetry Wivenhoe, Enchanted Conversation, Wombwell Rainbow, Ink Sweat & Tears, Three Drops from a Cauldron, The Brown Envelope Book, Littoral Magazine Abergavenny Small Press.

Poems from the Year 2020 (ed. M. Williams, Shoestring, 2021) Life in Captivity (Finishing Line Press, 2011)

One Breath came third in the Gloucestershire Poetry Society’s 2020 competition.

Contents

Foreword

Prologue: The Real World

Fool on the Mountain

Butterfly Effect

How to be a Tarot Card, or a Teenager

Bateleur Eagle

The Magi

Says the Magus

Difference

Hymn

The Empress

To My Mother, 100 Years from Now

Putting on 15th Century Clothing Blindfolded

Dr Wick

Shrapnel

The Green Man

Circe

Sign

Given

Tristan and Yseult

A Little Space

Curved

The Civilised Princeling

Deaths of the Salem Witches

The Nun Who Knew

Self Portrait as Empty Coke Can

Life in Captivity

There May Have Been Lions

My Own World

Gifted

One, Please

Lamplighter

Wager

Replacing the Fuse Boxes

Icarus after Lockdown

The Stag

Waterbed

Riding Out in October

Who Goes There?

Gringolet

High Achiever

The Miracle of Wings

Why Snakes are Always Female

Skinwalker

Don’t Look

The Girl in the Raven Mask

Meditationary

Hagged

One Breath

Devilskin

Horse-face and Ox-head

Kali Ma

Broken Tower

Bad Hours

The Cave and the Hill

There is Nothing on the North Dakota Plains

Hope

The Lighthouse Keepers’ Daughter

O

Hunting the Moon

Monarch Butterflies at Watch Hill Light

The Boy Who Went Back to Singapore

Another Dark Dawn

Sunflower

The Lights Went Off

Judgment

How to be a Flawed Person

Ritual

Yesterdays

Fire in the Sky

Coyotes

The Wishing Tree

Universe

Notes

Foreword

These poems are presented in the order of the tarot major arcana which inspired them, starting with the Fool. I chose to use strength as arcanum 8, and justice as arcanum 11, some decks have them the other way around.

I own the decks I used to generate some of these poems, physically, so could sit shuffling through deck after deck, staring and comparing. There is no specific rhyme or reason to my Tarot deck collection. Many were gifts. Where a poem was inspired by a card from a specific deck, you can find specific artwork that inspired me at https://pin.it/4ZxYbzf. Where there is no link, either there was no specific card or deck, or that card was from the ‘standard’ Rider-Waite-Smith deck (such as The Empress).

Most of these poems riff on the ideas behind the major arcana, rather than on the arcana themselves. Some of them, like The Girl with the Raven Mask, however, are ekphrastic as well.

I’d like to thank Wendy Pratt, Gill Lambert, Mark Connors and Sarah L. Dixon, at whose workshops some of these poems took shape. Jo Bell, too, with her November lockdown prompts, aided the creation of a few poems here. Also the Back Room Poets, and both Oxford Stanza groups, who gave and always give me good constructive criticism. Sara Uckelman and Diana Probst were my readers.

Lastly, thanks to Cherry Potts, editor extraordinaire.

Jennifer A. McGowan

Oxford, January 2022

Prologue

The Real World

Traffic no matter the season,

metal sins pressing rubber

into the muted earth.

Fool on the Mountain

Never a woman, hardly a man,

you are the jester, a butterfly

sans chrysalis, a tiger in motley.

You stride through alphabets

looking for Solomon’s key to make your own,

to be both sign and signified.

Tired of mandarins you climb down,

soul tied up in a kerchief for safekeeping.

Somewhere a dog chooses you. It happens.

Trousers and skirt, you look up, look back

to where you were, and laugh; rise up

on your toes; step out into the loving air;

vanish into the rest of you.

Butterfly Effect

There are no mountains in Rhode Island,

so there are no mandarins, either.

Just mafia. My father treated them.

He was a doctor. They survived, thank Christ.

When I lived near Philly

the fire department displayed

an execution car.

Over a thousand bullet holes.

It didn’t look real. It stayed there

for months until rust killed it.